Week 2: Having Fun Writing for Myself but, Haha, External Rules Still Apply

Salutations, and happy 90th birthday to Yuri Gagarin.

TL;DR

1. Violence + Information used to control people

2. First satire piece (news article about Trump taking Math classes because he can’t get his facts straight) is complete!

3. Couldn’t submit it anywhere because it was a news satire piece 🙁 

4. Figuring out new styles of satire that fit into what comedy sites accept more frequently 

What I Found 

Some journals I looked at: 

>>Chp 3: Cambodia

>>Chp 5: Smashing the Enemies: The organization of violence in Democratic Kampuchea 

>>Russian and African Media: Exercising Soft Power

>>The Rise of the Stalin Personality Cult

>>A Veil of Legality- Trujillo Dictatorship    

Central Themes:

Leaders with total power can either use their control over the dissemination/content of information or over the military to perpetuate their position. E.G. You either trick someone into thinking you are doing what’s right for the country or you bully them into not saying anything . More information for nerds at the end of the post.  

**Side Note** 

Although not mentioned in my list, I did spend a lot of time scrolling through current news (AP, Reuters, BBC) especially focusing on Russia, Ukraine, and Eritrea. Russia and Eritrea rule in disturbingly authoritarian ways similar to the likes of Idi Amin, Pol Pot, and Stalin… 

What I Created

I finished my first satire piece! 

I am still deciding how I am going to share them to the world (concerns of anonymity, publishing etc.), but I can say what it’s about 🙂 ! It’s styled as a news article that’s covering the story of how Trump is being forced into after school math classes to remediate his math skills- as his constant “mixing up” of numbers is getting him in trouble with some of his big party donors.

It was inspired by the fact checking that I did last week about everything Trump said in his CPAC speech. Out of the few facts he did manage to say, most of them were completely false or largely inaccurate. It’s wild how desensitized the individuals/the media have become to Trump outright lying so I made my piece dedicated to that. The tone is understated throughout, and the individuals quoted in the article frame trump’s consistent lies as accidental rather than purposeful.  

Issues

The list of comedy sites that take unsolicited satire submissions: 

* The Belladonna

* Points in Case

* Mcsweeneys

* Feathertale

The list of comedy sites that take unsolicited ‘NEWS SATIRE’ submissions:

*  …

As you can see that was a bit of a problem. Apparently all of the sites I mentioned are too in awe of The Onion and Reductress to be willing to  accept news satire pieces.  McSweeney’s, under “Some Reasons We Might Dislike your Submission”, even humbly said, “Your submission was formatted like a news article. (There is another website that does this sort of thing much better than we ever could)”. So after a quick angst-filled moment where I raged at this horrific injustice, I started rewriting some of my other drafts to be in style that most of the aforementioned sites accept.

Here are a couple of my rough ideas: 

        >>Putin turns corporate- written as an email acceptance letter, describes how what Putin has done to control the spread of information

>> Advertising convention- posthumously awards to dictators for their contributions to further the field of ((propaganda)) marketing

        >>Rose Colored glasses by Oakley- mocks the “good old days’ rhetoric that modern and antiquated leaders use to spread dissatisfaction among people

Extra Summaries of Dictator Exploits 

Raphael Trujillo

Trujillo (who I researched more wk 1 too) was fascinating because he managed to rewrite the whole history of Haitian-Dominican race relations. He hated the limited power he had over the local governors in the Dominican Republic; The local governors refused to abide by Trujillo’s demands to arrest and deport/force Haitians to work on sugar plantations, as they rightly believed it to be unconstitutional. Rural Dominicans and Haitians got along relatively well due to the natural intermingling that occurred along the unenforced Dom-Haiti border. Trujillo’s soldiers killed 10-20 thousand Haitians and people of Haitian descent in the Dajabon region to scare local leaders into complying with his anti-Haitian policies. To justify his actions, he encouraged many of the already anti-Haitian urban, Dominican intellectuals to rewrite the natural and peaceful diffusion of semi-nomadic Haitian farmers along the Dominican border as a persistent attack on Dominican freedoms.

Khmer Rouge 

Democratic Kampuchea (Cambodia) had a long history of violence as well. The Khmer Rouge rose to power after Cambodia had been severely weakened by US bombings during the Vietnam war (although Cambodia was unaligned, the US bombed their border with Thailand) and began an incredibly oppressive regime. There was a tiered prison system, where depending on your crime (opposing the regime, being a teacher, wearing glasses) you would be sent to reeducation camps or the ultimate S21 prison. 2 million people died during the Khmer Rouge’s reign from starvation and execution. And even after Vietnam invaded and installed their own puppet Marxist party, former members of the Khmer Rouge still stayed in government.